A network system generally includes a number of devices connected so as to allow communication among the devices such as desktop machines, servers, hosts, printers, fax machines, switches, and routers. Nowadays, due to the advantages (e.g., cost benefits and productivity gains) created by network technology in communication provided by networks, businesses and other organizations are increasingly dependent on their networks. Consequently, today's networks are often highly complex and include numerous devices. Furthermore, the network topology and network traffic may change as the network evolves with additional newer devices added to the network, or the removal of older devices from the network. As the network changes and grows increasingly large and complex, effective network management has become increasingly vital to businesses and other organizations.
Network management encompasses several areas including configuration management, accounting management, fault management, security management, and performance management. In particular, the area of fault management deals with being able to detect network faults, notifying users of network faults, logging network faults, and fixing network faults in order to keep the network operating efficiently and productively. As network faults can cause considerable network degradation and/or downtime, successful fault management is an important aspect of good network management.
However, conventionally, network management products are more focused on network monitoring and are limited in their actual network analysis capabilities. Many network management products that are aimed at large enterprise customers must support heterogeneous devices (a mix of devices from different vendors). Because such network management products are usually focused on breadth of analysis rather than depth of analysis, they are often constrained by the limited commonality across the heterogeneous devices. On the other hand, while network management products aimed at smaller customers tend to provide better command and control capabilities for their homogeneous (single vendor) devices than their counterparts that are aimed at larger enterprises, they are often less sophisticated in their capabilities and lack the ability to diagnose the root cause of network faults. Such network management products provide better command and control capabilities than their enterprise-focused counterparts because they assume a relatively homogenous environment, a situation that is more often encountered with smaller network deployments. Finally, for other network management products that can discover and compute topology for heterogeneous devices, the command and control capabilities across the devices are usually still segregated (typically by device vendor) by a hodgepodge of vendor-specific tools that plug into the heterogeneous management platform. This scenario generally results in a plethora of data for the network administrator to interpret when attempting to identify, analyze, and rectify network faults because of the differences in capability and presentation between the various vendors' tools.